There is only one small saving grace in the three hours it took Martin Scorsese to remake Ben Younger’s 2000 Boiler Room (by adding more money, more sex, more drugs and vast wads of Leonardo DiCaprio to no better effect).

That brief moment is when the movie shows snatches of “infomercials” made by DiCaprio’s character - the real-life scumbag, fraudster, rat and conman, Jordan Belfort. They’re the standard “get rich quick” ads with the usual patsies and actors claiming it worked for them.

Hopefully, people watching the movie will recognise the genre and have nothing to do with anything like that sales pitch, because it remains as common as grass.

The rubbish is easy to spot, whether it’s promising that trading forex is an easy way anyone can make money, flogging a computer program that magically picks winners, or featuring the latest shyster with some other secret for wealth he (or she) just can’t wait to give away. Yeah, right.

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But aside from that, the movie is primarily annoying. Even the copious sex fails to titillate.

For a start, it’s at least an hour too long. It’s simply indulgent direction to let it run for three hours, a sign someone thinks everything they’ve done is too good to cut. Too many long, repetitive monologues by DiCaprio. Too much everything, actually, climaxing in a storm at sea that’s as unnecessary as it was poorly done.

More importantly, it makes the mistake of telling the story exclusively from Jordan Belfort’s point of view and as a comedy, making the low-life seem far grander that he actually was, or is.

The biggest failure is that at no stage do the victims get a look in.

Not once is Belfort’s massive fraud personalised. It’s a mistake Boiler Room didn’t make. If Hollywood (and this movie is very Hollywood) doesn’t show the average audience the horrific human cost of such crime – the lost homes, the broken marriages, the suicides – plenty of dumb punters will miss the point and cheer along with the dwarf throwing and double teaming.

There was almost an acknowledgment of that within the story.

When Forbes exposed Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont as the shonky boiler room it was, it did the firm no harm and instead brought a rush of applications from people who wanted to work there.

There’s an undertone in Belfort’s version of events that if people were so stupid as to do business with Stratton Oakmont, they deserved to lose their money.

Look at the real misery caused by our little Storm Financial scandal, the many lives ruined. Storm was one of the outfits that promised easy and quick wealth, its principal flashing his lavish lifestyle as proof, just as Belfort did. It’s necessary to acknowledge that to keep Belfort in perspective.

As for Belfort making money out of the movie rights and his books and now on the speakers’ circuit, there is a degree of obscenity far beyond this movie setting a record for the use of the F word. I didn’t realise how obscene until I read a review by Joel Cohen, one of the men who put Belfort away. It had slipped by me that Belfort has a minor role in the movie, introducing DeCaprio as himself in his latest incarnation as a trainer of salespeople.

Writes Cohen:

“Some might think the movie’s ending is a cute conceit: putting the artist and his muse together on a stage for a final scene. To his victims, it is a beyond an insult. And for anyone who is enticed to pay Mr Belfort to hear his recordings and speeches, it aids and abets this unrepentant character in possibly duping others yet again.

“Should it be surprising that following the release of the movie, Mr Belfort is reportedly negotiating to host a reality-TV show?

“The Wolf of Wall Street creators can possibly justify excluding victims from their story, but not while they literally give the final scene to the real Jordan Belfort. That might be art, but it’s wrong.”

No, Mr Cohen, that’s not art – that’s indulgence, a little in-joke. As Cohen and others have reported, Belfort is supposed to be paying half of his present seven-figure income as restitution for those people he robbed, but he’s not. He’s as slimy and crooked as ever.

But the most annoying thing of all? The real Belfort only served 22 months in jail for defrauding people of $200 million. Maybe the movie does have another lesson: conmen get off far too easily. If you’re going to rob people, fraud is the only way to go.